Vasyugan on the border of centuries: khanties or ostyaks?

The topic of my presentation covers the public discourses about the Vasyugan Khanties living in the territory of the Tomsk Oblast'. The Khanties are not visible in the public sphere of the oblast'. The official and popular memory - which must not be mixed up with the forums of the historical sciences - only mentions archeological cultures as precedents to "real" Russian history. Why are the indigenous people, the Khanties so hidden? There are at least two possible answers. First, there is a lack of exoticism as another cause for their invisibility: the prototype of "Siberianism", of "aboriginality" was and is embodied for the majority in both high literature and popular culture by the Khanties of the KhMAO and the Evenki. Thirdly in the memory of the okrug the key role is played by the deportations, the modern self-image of the region is being developed along repression process. In the "master narrative" of the deportations natives have no place: they would apparently lose the sense or significance of their suffering, if they acknowledged that before them the place had already been civilized, humanized. The concept of Khanties in local public discourse makes it hard for the Khanties to acknowledge their Khanty identity and to integrate the Khanty memories into a common collective remembrance. The population of the oblast' conceive of the Khanties as a special social group distinguished by their way of life, and not as an ethnic group. This conception has elements of neutral value such as the view on their close attachment to the forest and the taiga. The negative connotations associated with the "Khanty" as a life-style community are stronger, envisaging them as members of a poverty culture, in most cases a marginalized, lumpenized culture. The Vasyugan Khanties epitomize how an ethnic group can become invisible, then visible again in the local discourse; how natives can be lost tossed between life-style and ethnic discourses. From a marginalized life-style group without political, cultural and economic potential the Vasyugan Khanties have become an ethnic group of considerable potential upon the deliberate or unintentional, direct or indirect influence of the scholarly sphere and some individual researchers. The process is going on along two inseparable lines, patrimonization and traumatization.

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